Hannah Rich and Simon Perfect reflect on the poignance of Ash Wednesday in the midst of war and fear. 02/03/2022
This Ash Wednesday feels markedly different.
We wake up to ever more horrifying news of the war in Ukraine. And with it, we wake to the loss of the innocence that many in Western Europe, particularly those of younger generations, have enjoyed since the Cold War. The unconscious, comfortable belief that war is a relic of Europe’s past, and that liberal democracy will, in the end, triumph is being shaken, along with the old guarantees that our freedoms and liberties are secure and ultimate. There is an implicitly naïve assumption at play here; millions across the globe have long known this to be mere wishful thinking. But for those of us born in a particular window of time, in a particular geographical area, the luxury of geopolitical naivety has been ours to hold onto.
We also wake to yet more news of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that many of the impacts of climate change are now “irreversible”. The UN Secretary General says we are looking at an “atlas of human suffering”. It’s also an atlas of growing human hopelessness. For perhaps the first time in decades, it feels like a great many people in the West believe in an endpoint in human history – one that is inescapably negative and without hope. For all the darkness of history, our Christian forebears were able to believe in an end that would be positive – for themselves at least. Yet now, the ‘world without end’ for which Christians pray may still be a theological reality, but in material, planetary terms, seems fragile.
In the midst of this, we come to Ash Wednesday, a day of penitence and fasting at the beginning of Lent. Today, Christians across the world will mark themselves with ash, as a sign of brokenness and repentance. The words traditionally used to accompany this are a memento of our mortality: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return”.
Ashes are a reminder that we are each both broken and shaped by one another’s brokenness. They insist that we cannot dismiss war, poverty and climate instability as a faraway problem, if we had deluded ourselves that we could. There is an equalising effect of the mark we bear on our foreheads today, which makes visible the reality that suffering elsewhere is suffering here. The ashes of destruction that mark the other also inescapably mark us.
This is true, on Ash Wednesday and on other days, as theologian Walter Brueggemann writes in his poem ‘Marked by Ashes’ in the incisively titled ‘Prayers for a Privileged People’:
“but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes —
we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
of failed hope and broken promises,
of forgotten children and frightened women,
we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.”
We are living in a world in which all our Wednesdays are now very tangibly marked by ashes, in which the taste of our own mortality lingers closer to home than many of us have known, amid pandemic and conflict.
But Ash Wednesday does not allow the brokenness to win. It points to the enduring Christian hope that one day, ash will be wiped away and earthly wars will cease.
As Brueggemann concludes, “we are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipate your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.”
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